Christ, this wind.
Storms are tearing up London. The girders of our estate creak and groan beneath the weight of half a dozen baby cyclones and fun-sized hurricanes. Look outside and you can see cars, trees, commuter couples being hurled through the air. I was riding to work the other day only to be stunned on the side of the head by a lower-middle class family and their twin-child buggy. And that's not all. The trail of destruction started three days before the end of 2006: I left the bathroom window whereapon it banged back on the hinge, shattered and deposited itself on the cracked paving stones below. Christ. I peered down. I half expected to see a couple of stricken OAPs sprawled out on the concrete, painting their brains on the pavement in a big red puddle - but no, there was just an angry grimace of glass shards glaring back up at me.
I guess I'm just doing my bit for the community.
What’s wrong with the world? Look up at the sky. Go on, just look at it. Can you figure it out? It’s grey while teeming with sunlight. Half-arsed clouds crackle with tension under a sun the colour of a migraine. The weather, basically, makes no sense, and the scientific consensus is once again blaming environmental abuse. Forget having a climate like Ibiza. If by 2037 we’re not all marooned on a planet-sized oil-slick swatting killer mosquitos from our faces and gouging out the contents of our skulls with rods of glowing plutonium to stem the pain of our brain tumours, I’m going to be pleasantly surprised.
In the midst of all this environmental chaos we suddenly realise there's a person-sized hole in our flat which needs to be filled. But before we can illegally sublet the room we need to clear it out. On doing so we find, buried beneath all the crap we find a bedsheet covered in – guess what? wait for it – bloodstains.
‘This is good,’ my flatmate says, smoothing it out and examining it. ‘We can put this on the matress, to make their bed look better.’
‘I’m not sure… I mean, it’s covered in bloodstains.’
‘Yeah! It’s weird… I wonder where they came from.’
‘It is an interesting question,' I agree. 'I mean did someone fucking give birth in here? Or gestate an alien in their stomach?'
We have a look on the inventory the landlords left. Would you believe it - the bloodstained sheet is listed.
‘Don’t wash it,’ my flatmate warns. ‘They might charge us for the damage to the stains.’
Of course, we cant be arsed to clear the room out properly, and leave the bloodstained sheet as part of the general Turkish Jail chic. So the next day, twenty minutes before the first prospective roomate is due to arrive, we suddenly realise that the room still resembles the cellar in the ‘Saw’ films and rush about trying to beautify it.
This is a genuine conversation we had while trying to dress the room up:
‘Does that matress need a cover?’
‘Yeah, but it’s got bits of mud all over it.’
‘Okay, let’s improvise… Have you got a sheet, Toby?’
‘I have, but it smells of feet.’
‘Shit.’
‘Why do we need a sheet, anyway? We don’t need a sheet on the bed.’
‘No, you need the sheet to cover up the bloodstains.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Let’s use this one, shall we?’
‘No, we cant use that one. That’s the only one we’ve got. If we use that one then we wont be able to cover up the matress.’
‘Why do we need to cover up the matress?’
‘Because otherwise they’ll be able to see it’s one and a half matresses that we’ve kind of stuck together.’
‘Oh yeah… That’s a good point.’
‘What’s your girlfriend shouting about?’
‘She’s just found a condom behind the cooker.’
‘Oh, right.’
God knows who’s going to end up moving in here.
